Beatus ille, thought Minaya: what an elevated life and work he desired until his death and never had. His books weren't there, but his words and eyes were, like scratches in the shadow, obsessively contemplating from the mantel over the fireplace the area of serene semidarkness and volumes in a row that he never reached. Crossed-out words or scratches of his poor handwriting suddenly appearing in the margins of a novel that Minaya leafed through for the sheer pleasure of touching the pages and looking at the romantic prints that interrupted them from time to time. He was cataloguing the beautiful volumes of the first French edition of Les voyages extraordi-naires—Manuel's father, a devotee of Verne's, must have bought them in Paris early in the century — when he noticed that L'île mystérieux was missing. He searched all the shelves in vain for the book and asked Manuel about it, who didn't remember having seen it. One morning, when he went into the library, Inès was there dusting the bookcases and the furniture and replacing the bottles in the liquor cabinet. L'île mystérieux was on Minaya's desk.
"I brought it back," Inès said. "I finished reading it last night."
"But it's in French," said Minaya, and immediately regretted saying it because she set aside the duster and stood looking at him with an expression of impassive mockery in her chestnut-colored eyes.
"I know that."
To escape his embarrassment, Minaya feigned a sudden interest in his work and didn't stop writing on the file cards until Inés left the library. This was how she would always leave him, so often lost in stupefaction, halted at the brink of a revelation he never could attain and besieged by the desire not only for her body but above all for everything her body and her gaze concealed, because in her, caresses and hungry kisses and fatigued, final stillness were the mask and the lure that hid her from Minaya, so that each boundary of desire he crossed with her was not its assuaging consummation but an impulse to go even deeper and tear away the veils of silence or words that inexhaustibly imposed themselves on Inés' consciousness. But the sensation of advancing was completely illusory, for it wasn't a question of successive veils that would eventually end in the true, unknown face of Inés, but of a single, reiterated, immobile one: the eyes and mouth and thin lips she tensed to apologize or to smile, the voice and face that Minaya never could fix for any length of time in his memory. Slowly he turned the large yellow pages of L'île mystérieux and stopped at the last print: when those who had been shipwrecked have abandoned the Nautilus, fleeing the eruption that will destroy the island, Captain Nemo dies alone in the splendor of his submerged library. There was a handwritten note at the bottom of the print, and it was difficult for Minaya to decipher it because the blue ink had almost faded. "3-11-47. If only I had the courage of Captain Nemo. My name is nobody, says Ulysses, and that saves him from the Cyclops. JS."
But between himself and the words written by Jacinto Solana, which always had the quality of a voice, there now was Inés, mocking his clumsiness, and the book she had brought back was proof of her irony and her absence, for Minaya still found himself in that trance in which desire, not yet revealed in its deceitful plenitude, advances like a nocturnal enemy and makes accomplices of all the things that are transformed into emissaries or signs of the creature who has touched them or to whom they belong. The large house on the Plaza of the Fallen, one of Inés' shirts on the clothesline in the garden, her coat, her pink kerchief on the coatrack, the bed and the glass of water on the night table in the room where she slept when she stayed at the house, the leather sofa where he kissed her for the first time at the beginning of March, Orlando's drawing that fell to the floor, interrupting the shared excitement of their embrace with a crash of broken glass when she pushed him with her hips against the wall and kissed him on the mouth with her eyes closed. As if the sound of the glass had awakened him from a dream, Minaya opened his eyes and saw before him the half-closed lids and eager wings of Ines' nose, who had not stopped kissing him. For a moment he was afraid that someone had come into the library, and he moved away from the girl, who still moaned in tender protest and then opened her eyes, smiling at him with lips wet and inflamed by his kiss.
"Don't worry. I'll tell Don Manuel the drawing fell when I was cleaning it."
When he picked it up, Minaya saw that something was written on the back. "Invitation," he read, and again it was the tiny, familiar, furious hand he had found a few weeks earlier in the novel by Jules Verne and that very soon he would secretly pursue through the most obscure drawers in the house, a slender thread of ink, a flowing stream not heard by anyone that led only to him, not to the key to the labyrinth he had already begun to imagine, but to the trap he himself was setting with his search. He saw the desk, the mirror, the hands on the paper, the pen that was tracing without hesitation or rest the final verses Jacinto Solana wrote not realizing until the end that the sheet he had used was the one where Orlando had drawn his portrait of Mariana. That night, when Minaya entered the library after supper, the drawing was back in its place with new glass. Sitting across from him, meditative and calm, Medina examined it with the attentive air of someone who suspects a falsification.
"I'll tell you something if you promise to keep it a secret. I never thought that poor Mariana was as attractive as they said. As Manuel and Solana said, of course, though Solana was very careful about saying it aloud. And do you know what they both suffered from? An excess of seminal fluids and literature — forgive my vulgarity. I suppose they've already told you that Solana was in love with her too. Desperately in love, and long before Manuel, but with the disadvantage that he was already married when he met her. Piously married in a civil ceremony, like the good Communist he was, feeling Christianly remorseful for the temptation of deceiving his wife and his best friend at the same time. Your father really never talked to you about it?"
6
TIME IN MÁGINA revolves around a clock and a statue. The clock on the tower of the wall built by the Arabs and the bronze statue of General Orduna, whose shoulders are yellow with rust and traces of pigeons and whose head and chest have nine bullet holes. When Minaya can't fall asleep and tosses and turns in the arduous duration of his insomnia, he is rescued by the great clock on the tower striking three in the empty Plaza of General Orduna, where the cab drivers stretch out and fall asleep on the backseats of their cars and an officer sitting in boredom at the entrance to the police station guards the door with his elbows on his knees and his flat-peaked cap down over his face, and perhaps he gives a start and sits up when above his head he hears the striking of the hour, which then, like a more distant, metallic resonance, is repeated in the tower of EL Salvador, its bulbous, lead-colored dome visible over the roofs on the Plaza of the Fallen, where Inés lives. Then there is almost a half minute of silence and suspended time that ends when it strikes three inside the house, but still very remote, on the clock in the library, and immediately, as if the hour were approaching Minaya, climbing the deserted stairs with inaudible steps and slipping along the checkered corridor of the gallery, the three bells strike very close to his bedroom, on the clock in the parlor, and so the whole city and the entire house and the consciousness of whoever cannot sleep eventually merge in a unique submerged and bidimensional correlation, time and space or past and future linked by a present that is empty and yet measurable: it precisely occupies the seconds that pass between the first bell in the tower of General Orduna and the last one that sounds in the parlor.